At a very basic level, written words and their constituent individual letters represent an encoded form of verbal speech. Such familiar encryptions can been stored in various ways. For instance, alphabetic representations have been stored in printed text, handwritten text and in formatives derived from various three dimensional objects. Where space limitations exist, alphabetic encrypted data has also been stored in a size that requires magnification in order to be viewed, such as with microfilm and microfiche storage media.
In digital computer systems, data must be encrypted prior to use, because today's computers recognize only specialized code. Due to this need, a variety of data codes and encoding schemes and apparatus are known in the prior art to provide for the encryption of data and storage of encoded data.
Despite the existence of these systems, however, there does exist a need for encoding means of other sorts. In designing such means, storage density should be considered so that a reasonably large amount of data can be stored in a relatively small space. Further, the encryption process itself should be relatively speedy and accurate. If possible the storage media itself should be substantially non-volitile, to minimize the risk of losing data due to environmental factors.